What is on Your Mind?

I've read about BITNET, CompuServe... CompuServe was probably not a network but an online service. Are (were) there any other networks alternative to Internet? Does anyone have experience with them? Do they still exist, is it possible to access them over Internet? There seems not to be another way at the moment... Generally, who can tell more about them?

I used compuserve back in the day. It was a network of sorts, at least among its service half. Ordinary people dialed in. I was quite young at the time but I remember it mostly as a ball of services. My father used it instead of DATAPAC to access medical research, it meant that instead of having to sign up for access to one silly remote mainframe at exorbatant prices then fight for dial-in time, you could sign up for compuserve and access it more cheaply and conveniently -- if that system was offered on compuserve. They also had something like email, file repositories, and forums, and a search that could (slowly) trawl through them all.

It's all gone now as far as I can tell. Compuserve bit by bit became an internet provider instead of a compuserve provider, compuserve messaging dumped for more globally-useful email, compuserve search dumped for, in those days, the woefully more primitive web spiders... It's only now that Google's parcelled up its internet search that it's anything like it was. Forums and repositories either dumped outright or converted to web, prices going up as their lucrative big services dumped them to make web interfaces(so they could charge ordinary people ridiculous prices again, bleh!).

If there's not decent internet access where you are, the data lines just may not be there. Compuserve was built out of data lines too.

Corona688, yow it's interesting what you told. For me it's not about problems with Internet access, otherewise i wouldn't write here. For me it's about modern junk and good old things like gopher, uucp, and so on.

IMHO, there was nothing "good old things" about gopher, uucp, etc. I used gopher, wais, uucp ,etc and am glad they are relics of the past, personally speaking.

For me, there is nothing nostalgic about those old applications. The "Modern Junk" as you call it, is much, much better, in my opinion.

Yow, cool! What's about WAIS? Are there still any WAIS servers on the Net today? When speaking of what is junk and what's not, it is of course a personal position of each, for me better are old-style real things like ed, for example, email, uucp, you know, such things, and all of that in command line. If i had a real COM terminal, it would be great! The problem is that seems not to be any of them today any more. By the way, what do you think of z39.50? Is a pretty thing, huh?

I was a consultant at the National Science Foundation (NSF) and tried to get the "top brass" to drop Gopher/WAIS for HTML/WWW. They thought I was crazy and fought me tooth-and-nail. It was really funny, there I was, configuring Solaris machines for NSF and redesigning CommerceNet (as the "contractor" lead architect for CommerceNet) for WWW, being told by the NSF scientists that I was "a radical" because I told them Gopher/WAIS was "dead" and they should convert to WWW.

Thank you for reminding me of those days..... much appreciated. It reminds me of the many ironies in my career in the late 1980s and early 90s...... Can you believe I was "attacked" for telling the NSF that Gopher/WAIS would be overcome by HTML/WWW then? Their scientists said "no way!"....

Another story....

When I demo'ed HTML/WWW to the USAF (again as a consultant/contractor), the support squadron told a top general that WWW could only read, not write to a database. I stopped them and said "not true, there is nothing in the protocol to prohibit read/write" and got in trouble then...

What a wacky, political world we live in!

Did you work with sendmail? Usenet news? IRC? BBS?